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Emu: species-level microbial community profiling of full-length 16S rRNA Oxford Nanopore sequencing data

Abstract

16S ribosomal RNA-based analysis is the established standard for elucidating the composition of microbial communities. While short-read 16S rRNA analyses are largely confined to genus-level resolution at best, given that only a portion of the gene is sequenced, full-length 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequences have the potential to provide species-level accuracy. However, existing taxonomic identification algorithms are not optimized for the increased read length and error rate often observed in long-read data. Here we present Emu, an approach that uses an expectation–maximization algorithm to generate taxonomic abundance profiles from full-length 16S rRNA reads. Results produced from simulated datasets and mock communities show that Emu is capable of accurate microbial community profiling while obtaining fewer false positives and false negatives than alternative methods. Additionally, we illustrate a real-world application of Emu by comparing clinical sample composition estimates generated by an established whole-genome shotgun sequencing workflow with those returned by full-length 16S rRNA gene sequences processed with Emu.

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Fig. 1: The Emu algorithm.
Fig. 2: Performance on simulated ONT reads.
Fig. 3: Performance on our ZymoBIOMICS community standard dataset.
Fig. 4: Relative error after consecutive EM iterations within Emu on ZymoBIOMICS ONT reads.

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Data availability

All sequenced samples used in this study are publicly available on Sequence Read Achieve (SRA). Both ZymoBIOMICS datasets are under BioProject ID PRJNA587452 with SRA accessions SRR10391201 for ONT and SRR10391187 for Illumina33. Our gut mock community is under BioProject ID PRJNA725207. The 12 vaginal samples used for our real-world application demonstration are uploaded under BioProject ID PRJNA723982. Our simulated sequences are publicly available on OSF under project 56UF7. Databases used in this paper include 16S RefSeq nucleotide sequence records (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/refseq/targetedloci/16S_process/), Ribosomal Database Project (RDP) v11.5 (https://rdp.cme.msu.edu/) and rrnDB v5.7 (https://rrndb.umms.med.umich.edu/). Study of vaginal microbiomes was approved by the ethics committee of the Medical Faculty of Heinrich Heine University. All patient samples were collected with informed consent from individuals in the context of an exploratory clinical microbiome study approved by the Ethics Committee of the Medical Faculty of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (institutional review board study identification ‘2019–600-andere Forschung erstvotierend’).

Code availability

Emu and all associate code are available on GitLab (https://gitlab.com/treangenlab/emu). Emu can be installed via Bioconda (https://anaconda.org/bioconda/emu). A Code Ocean capsule of the package is provided (https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.7761675.v1). All scripts and data used to compile quantitative comparison results can be found on GitLab (https://gitlab.com/treangenlab/emu-benchmark).

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Acknowledgements

We thank two additional members of the Treangen Laboratory, B. Kille for technical support and N. Sapoval for algorithm development. Computational support and infrastructure were provided by the Centre for Information and Media Technology (ZIM) at the University of Düsseldorf (Germany). This work has been supported by Jürgen Manchot Foundation and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) award 428994620 (A.D., A.T., W.M., P.F. and E.G.). This work has also been supported by NIH grants from NIDDK P30-DK56338, NIAID R01-AI10091401, U01-AI24290 and P01-AI152999, and NINR R01-NR013497 (T.S. and Q. Wu). Q. Wang and S.V. were supported in part by NIH grant R21NS106640 from the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). K.D.C. was supported in part by a Ken Kennedy Institute Computational Science and Engineering Graduate Recruiting Fellowship. K.D.C., M.G.N. and T.J.T. were supported in part by NIH grant P01-AI152999 from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). K.D.C. and T.J.T. were supported in part by NSF EF-2126387. M.G.N. was funded by a fellowship from the National Library of Medicine Training Program in Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (T15LM007093, PI: Kavraki).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

A.D. and T.J.T. derived the Emu concept and supervised the project. K.D.C., Q. Wang and M.G.N. developed the software. K.D.C., Q. Wang, A.T. and E.R produced results for benchmarking. P.F., E.G., W.M., S.S, Q. Wu, T.S. and S.V. generated sequencing data for analysis and contributed to the interpretation of results. K.D.C., Q. Wang, M.G.N., A.T., Q. Wu, E.R., A.D. and T.J.T. contributed to writing the original draft of the manuscript. All authors read, revised and approved the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Kristen D. Curry, Alexander Dilthey or Todd J. Treangen.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Methods thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Lin Tang, in collaboration with the Nature Methods team.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Pictorial representation of the complete Emu algorithm.

Follow the gray-arrowed path until expectation–maximization (EM) iterations are complete, then pink arrows are followed to the final composition estimate. The method starts by establishing probabilities for each alignment type C = [mismatch (X), insertion (I), deletion (D), softclip (S)] through occurrence counts in the primary alignments. Next, alignment probability P(r|t) is calculated for each read, taxonomy pair (r,t) by assuming the maximum alignment probability between r and t. Meanwhile, an evenly distributed composition vector F is initialized. The EM phase is entered by determining P(t|r), the probability that r emanated from t, for all P(r|t). F is updated accordingly, and the total log likelihood of the estimate is calculated. If the total log likelihood is a significant increase over the previous iteration (>.01), then EM iterations continue. Otherwise, the loop is exited, and F is trimmed to remove all entries less than the set threshold. Now following the pink arrows, one final round of estimation is completed with the trimmed F to produce the final sample composition estimate.

Extended Data Fig. 2 ZymoBIOMICS theoretical and imputed ground truth community profiles.

The theoretical values are taken from ZymoBIOMICS standard report of relative abundance estimates based on 16S rRNA gene copy numbers (https://files.zymoresearch.com/protocols/_d6305_d6306_zymobiomics_microbial_community_dna_standard.pdf). Truth_ONT and truth_illumina represent the ground truth relative abundances calculated for our ONT and Illumina datasets respectively, as described in the Establishing Ground Truth subsection under Methods.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Performance on our synthetic gut microbiome mock community.

Heatmap of species-level error between calculated ground truth and estimated relative abundances, where darker blue denotes an underestimate by the software, darker red denotes an overestimate, and white represents no error. All Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) errors are measured in relation to the ground truth of the ONT dataset, while Illumina errors are measured in relation to the ground truth for the Illumina dataset. Color scheme is capped at ±10, resulting in error greater than ±10% observing the maximum error colors. Displayed are the 20 species claiming the largest abundance in any of the ONT or Illumina sample results. ‘Other’ represents the sum of all species not shown in figure for the respective column. Species-level L1-norm, L2-norm, precision, recall, and F-score are also plotted for the methods evaluated.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Family-level relative abundance error heatmap of novel species simulation.

Heatmap of family-level error between ground truth and estimated relative abundances for both the Emu and RDP incomplete databases (missing 35 of the 345 CAMI2 simulated species) with our CAMI2 dataset. Here, darker blue denotes an underestimate by the software, darker red denotes an overestimate, and white represents no error. Color scheme is capped at ±3, resulting in error greater than ±3% observing the maximum error colors. Displayed are the families of the 35 species that were removed from each of the databases.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Bacterial community of 12 vaginal samples.

Species with estimated abundance of over 1% in at least one sample with either Emu or Bracken are shown. Data is grouped by condition: healthy control or vaginosis.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Tables 5, 6, 13, 14, 19 and 22–24 and Note 1.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Tables 1–4, 7–12, 15–18, 20 and 21

Complete abundance results from all analyses in the paper.

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Curry, K.D., Wang, Q., Nute, M.G. et al. Emu: species-level microbial community profiling of full-length 16S rRNA Oxford Nanopore sequencing data. Nat Methods 19, 845–853 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-022-01520-4

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